I have been musing and writing about technology since 1999 back in my native country Mauritius, dreaming back in 1997 of a world full of avatars...

amazon tablet kindle fire

The first few reviews of the new Amazon Kindle Fire tablet, the first colour device from Amazon, have appeared online and possibly the most detailed of them, the one from Engadget, mentions that the performance of the hardware is sluggish.

The tablet shares the same system on chip with the RIM Blackberry Playbook, a TI OMAP4 SoC, a model that broadly matches Apple's Cortex A9 based A5 SoC found inside the Apple iPad 2.

But alongside it is 512MB RAM and a non-conventional, heavily customised operating system based on an unknown iteration of Android with Amazon's own software layer.

The Kindle Fire though is unlike other tablets though. It is significantly cheaper, doesn't come with full access to Android market and, again according to Engadget, comes with some of the best, tightest integration of digital content into a mobile device on the market.

Amazon has yet to say when the tablet will become available in the UK and at what price. In the next few days, the Kindle Fire will face one of its most formidable adversaries, the Nook Tablet which also comes with the same screen size and the same TI OMAP SoC.